Fewer Americans are able/willing to hang on to their homes:
Aug. 14 (Bloomberg) — Banks repossessed almost three times as many U.S. homes in July than a year earlier and the number of homes receiving a foreclosure notice jumped 55 percent as more homeowners defaulted on their mortgages in the face of falling prices.
Bank seizures rose 184 percent to 77,295, the steepest increase since reporting began in January 2005, RealtyTrac, an Irvine, California-based seller of foreclosure data, said today in a statement. More than 272,000 properties, or one in 464 U.S. households, got a default notice, was warned of a pending auction or were foreclosed on. Nevada, California and Florida had the highest rates.
“It’s getting worse,” Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac’s executive vice president for marketing, said in an interview. “The number of properties that have been foreclosed on by the banks and still haven’t sold is the highest we’ve ever seen.”
Numbers from June were artificially low:
The June total of 252,363 reflected an “artificial depression” due to new state laws designed to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, Sharga said.
New York, California, Massachusetts, Colorado and Maryland are among the states that have imposed temporary foreclosure moratoriums or delayed proceedings by as many as 150 days. Those laws will “likely delay the inevitable that most of those properties go into foreclosure,” Sharga said.
So where will this end?
